Weekend Beats: Heavy Petty

Posted on by under Weekend Beats

“In my younger and more vulnerable years,” I thought She’s the One (1996!), directed by Ed Burns, was a great movie. It was about urban adults having affairs and feeling big important emotions, like guilt, lust, greed, and envy. To a nerdy teenager going to Catholic boys school in the suburbs, this all seemed so authentic. It also starred Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz (and Amanda Peet, and Leslie Mann) at the heights (or at least what I thought at the time were the heights) of their lady powers. This was a serious film, and I was a serious young man.

So yeah, the trailer doesn’t necessarily age well (that voice over is baaaaaad), but the movie’s still pretty decent, and the song in the background holds up. Tom Petty did the score for the movie, and “Walls” is my favorite of his songs from the 1990s. Yes, I know he had some classics in the early 1990s, but I stand by my statement. Do any of those other songs have Lindsey Buckingham on backing vocals? No? I rest my case. Enjoy the weekend (and this weird Eastern circus-themed video that probably cost a shitload of money to make), folks.

Cultural Literacy Redux

Posted on by under Authors, education, guides and nudges, Other Critics

I know I bash on the late-1960s morality play that is the “XX” blog over at Slate a lot, but outside of this little pocket of cliched topic sentences in search of evidence, Slate really is a great site. Troy Patterson is a big reason why this is so. Aside from being Slate‘s resident man of taste and class, he also has real chops. He’s the only person at that site (maybe save David Weigel) who I trust to use a term like “Tory” in an intellectually honest way. So I can’t say I was surprised to see that Patterson’s a man who takes E.D. Hirsch’s work seriously.

For those unfamiliar with Hirsch, he’s the kind of academic who would never get a tenure-track job today, even though, as Patterson points out (with an assist from one of this blog’s patron saints, Christopher Hitchens), many states are coming around to the idea that kids actually need to learn content in order to acquire skills. The fact that Hirsch’s concept of “cultural literacy” was ever controversial is evidence of the sad decadence and arrogance of some influential English and “Education” departments since the 1970s, when “theory” came into fashion and substituted Orwellian jargon for intelligence. Now, let me be clear (thanks for that phrase, Obama), most English departments are filled with people who really don’t care about what Derrida wrote (or said, or uttered, or whatever stupid word he mandated that we use). But even many of these people have to pretend like Derrida (or Foucault, or Butler, and…) is responsible for more than like 3 useful pages of ideas. One day this will change, but by then English departments may have specialized and de-literatured themselves out of existence.

In any case, Hirsch was and is a real weirdo: a tenured English professor who cares about teaching more than anything else. And not only teaching, as most profs will defend to the death their right to teach graduate seminars, but teaching K-12. What kind of suicidal English professor cares about kids he’s not actually teaching at the moment? One who understands that he will have to teach them at some point. More importantly, Hirsch is the kind of guy who actually thinks about the world beyond the classroom. While his love of testing and data makes me uncomfortable, if I had to pick a side in the education debate, it wouldn’t take me long to choose his over Dewey’s disciples preaching confidence over competence. Competence breeds confidence in the long run, and Hirsch understood that the best way to help the poor is to give them an education that will allow them to converse with and challenge those in positions of power. This is something David Foster Wallace also understood, and if you haven’t read “Tense Present” recently, go do that right now.

Back to Patterson though. I would have loved to see him extend his discussion of how the internet has changed what should be on Hirsch’s famous list of 10,000 terms/ideas/people/events that all Americans should know to consider how it has changed attitudes toward the value of knowing anything at all. Patterson writes:

Is it too bold to suppose that one must now know 10,000 basic things? Obviously, a lot has happened to general knowledge since the book’s publication, not a little of it connected to what now appears to be a lacuna on Hirsch’s list—a gap that developed between International Monetary Fund and interrogative sentence. The Internet is a force of information inflation, and much of the stuff on the list remains relevant, give or take a few relics and some slang terms (pop the question, bite the dust) now fully embedded in mainstream vocabulary.

He’s gazing down on what’s important here, but perhaps it’s too mixed up and awful for him to really get into. I know that feeling. For the last few years I’ve had students sincerely question why they should have to remember (let alone memorize) anything, as the internet will always be there for them as a handy outboard brain. Thankfully, some of my students look horrified when they hear a classmate say this, but the fact that this scene keeps playing itself out is worrisome. I tell them that the internet is not going to be there for them when they’re having a conversation with some smart guy/gal who might be able to give them a job. If they don’t know (or have to look up cultural references on their iPhones) mid-conversation, s/he ain’t going to be impressed. This obviously isn’t the only reason why remembering stuff is important, but if the fact that a job in an increasingly awful and bifurcated economy might hinge on it won’t sway people, I don’t know what will.

And people accuse us humanists of being romantics…

Topical Verse: The Short Game

Posted on by under Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

With the exception of Dorothy Parker, American poets have never been much for light verse. Ogden Nash doesn’t count, because his writing blows (File under: The Rhymes Usually Seem Forced, and also The Poems Are Not Funny). Things are different for English poets. This probably has something to do with their culture’s flair for irony, discomfort, and verbal wit, as well as its historical lack of an entrenched fundamentalist Protestantism. Think about it: even many of their Serious Poets are funny, like Shakespeare, Pope, Browning, Auden, Larkin, Louis MacNiece, Lord Byron, Donne (the dirty early stuff) and, well, you get the picture. Though not Milton. Oh god, not Milton.

Kingsley Amis is best known for novels like Lucky Jim, The Old Devils, and One Fat Englishman, all works that established him as one of the past century’s great comic novelists. But he was also a bang-up poet (seriously, he’s in the Norton anthologies) and a solid critic, so it isn’t surprising that his edition of The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1987) is great. Here are two poems, both short, both always topical, neither serious.

“Limeraiku” (by Ted Pauker)

There’s a vile old man
Of Japan who roars at whores:
“Where’s your bloody fan?”

—————

“Miss Twye” (by Gavin Ewart)

Miss Twye was soaping her breasts in the bath
When she heard behind her a meaning laugh
And to her amazement she discovered
A wicked man in the bathroom cupboard.

Stir It Up: Rebecca Schuman Lands Some Punches

Posted on by under Authors, education, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno

Back in April, Rebecca Schuman published a piece on Slate titled “Thesis Hatement.” (Come on, lulz: low-hanging puns can be great.) Dan actually mentioned it as part of a “Saturday Links” blast. Despite the fact that it is sane, reality-based, and urgent without being shrill, “Thesis Hatement” caused a lot of Slate commenters (including a fair number of academics), to go batshit. She addresses the haters in a delightfully acidic response on her blog, Pan Kisses Kafka, which is part of the rapidly emerging “postacademic” community. (Post-acad stuff from other writers here and here and here and here, for starters. And also a recent piece RS wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education).

Given the seething response the essay got from some quarters, it bears repeating that Schuman’s piece is a humane, valuable polemic. I re-read it today as I sat in my studio apartment, just after I paid this month’s student-loan bill, in fact. (Back when I started graduate school I actually believed insane bullshit like “Student-loan is good debt.”). Her work is based on personal experience but is not narcissistic or even all that autobiographical. It is precise and witty. And it underscores some dreadful things that any reasonable person (even many tenured Boomers!) with a functional knowledge of US academic culture would have a difficult time refuting: that the present labor environment at too many American colleges and universities puts terrible psychological and social demands upon too many faculty, especially younger PhDs and graduate students; that it offers little material incentive for facing these challenges; and that it trains the tormented not only to accept their torment as a professional duty, but to view any escape from that torment as a personal and professional failure.

A bummer, I know. So here is a picture of Iggy Pop vacuuming his living room. Cheer up, y’all: it’s the weekend.

Link

Good Reviews: “Common Ground: Brenda Stevenson’s ‘The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins'”

As a blog person, I do my best to profit secondarily from brilliant friends. Rachel Monroe is one of these, and, lucky for you, she just wrote a cool piece about a cool book about American violence (et cetera) for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Stop looking out the windows! Stop checking Instagram! Go read!

Nodding Along

Posted on by under education, Other Critics, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

If you are having a great weekend and would rather not think about something completely depressing, something like, say, America’s fundamentally broken K-12 education system, then please do not click on this. If your weekend’s already all shot to hell though (hungover; alone again, naturally; hunting for a job; etc.), I’d like to encourage you to read Jerald Isseks’ honest and disturbing essay about the lies most of us tell and are told about public education. He makes a point that others have made before but can’t be made often enough:

Americans want to talk about how much our kids are failing these days. Those outside the educational system all have their fierce, personal criticisms. And on the front lines, in those faculty meetings, data sessions, and behind the closed doors of ruinous classrooms, teachers and administrators are telling the same stories. There’s the one about the unfocused kids who need to be taught discipline and compliance so they can get a job; the one about the parents who are setting a bad example and creating a negative home environment; the one about the teachers who aren’t a good fit because they aren’t holding their students accountable for doing work that renders them comatose. We tell these stories as we busy ourselves, trying to reassemble the parts of a machine we refuse to admit is fundamentally, and fatally, flawed. Just like we are. Meanwhile, our students are losing interest, losing hope, and vanishing from our records altogether, and for all the productive work we do, we aren’t doing much to bring them back.

Just like Bush before him, Obama has been a complete disaster on education. But Ryan and I have both said this before, and there’s honestly only so much a president can do about a byzantine system of interlocking federal and state policies designed to line the pockets of textbook publishers, tech companies, test companies, test prep companies, union bosses, accrediting agencies, and [insert just about anyone other than students and teachers here]. So yeah, I don’t expect the president (or a senator, or a governor) to come up with some plan to fix K-12 all at once. But I do expect them to be as honest about the state of things as Isseks is. Instead, we get conservatives bleating that collective bargaining is the source of all of our problems, liberals screaming that dumping more money into horribly managed schools is the only obvious solution, technocrats acting like giving every kid an iPad is something other than a giveaway to Silicon Valley, and parents, teachers, and students absolving themselves of any responsibility.

The truth is that we’re all to blame for what’s happening. I teach college in part because the idea of teaching high school kids how to write is terrifying and depressing for all of the reasons Isseks outlines in his article. That’s lame on my part, and I should own that. Still, if Isseks and I are willing to admit our own complicity, shouldn’t everyone else? Shouldn’t our elected officials and technocrat class admit that they totally didn’t see how their fulsome embrace of neoliberal globalization would lead to the hollowing out of the middle class, effectively making a high school diploma worthless to anyone trying to earn anything other than minimum wage? Shouldn’t teachers unions acknowledge that granting K-12 teachers tenure so quickly and placing so much emphasis on seniority at the expense of quality can lead to some pretty perverse consequences? And shouldn’t the president take a step back and think about how his “college for everyone” rhetoric might be hurting more than it’s helping?

Obviously, none of this will happen. We live in a country where a not insignificant portion of the population would rather see us go back into an economic depression than live under the other party’s health care system (which was originally their party’s health care plan, but whatever, nothing to see here). People seem to care more about being right even if that means being completely wrong. Liberals can be just as bad. And so we’ll keep doing the same things we’ve always done, just worse and with apps that make us think we are smarter and more advanced than we are. Happy f’ing Sunday, folks.

Good Reviews: More like “Back to DERP”

Posted on by under Authors, Good Reviews, Other Critics, Reviews

Esquire is gross. We’ve covered that. Not many texts are more ephemeral than book reviews in Esquire, except maybe reviews in Esquire of recent books by Tom Wolfe; the neo-Social Realist ones. And yet although nothing Tom Wolfe, Esquire, or the General Reader does matters, Benjamin Alsup’s compact but weirdly patient, vicious disposal of Wolfe’s Back to Blood (yeesh, the title) is worth your bytes and clicks. A fundamental thrust:

[. . .] There are no characters in Back to Blood, only caricatures, cartoonish stereotypes that are little more than reflections of their sociocultural contexts. The Cuban cop who loves his pastelitos. The preppy reporter with all the right credentials. The Hialeah honey with a heart of gold and a pussy like a papaya. In Back to Blood, Wolfe comes across as a white guy explaining brown people to a room full of white guys. Sure, he burns pages giving his readers access to these characters’ interiors, but once he’s given you the sociological stats (age, gender, race, occupation) there’s really no need for it. Anything Wolfe tells you about what his characters are thinking are things you could’ve guessed from the jump.

We want your weekend to prosper. We don’t want you wasting time with shitty art. So believe us when we say this, y’all: If it ever comes down to white urban writers, you are better off (you are fantastically well-off) with David Simon or Richard Price (or Tom Wolfe from before 1980).